Electro-Harmonis LPB1 is a perfect pedal for those of you who just need a basic volume boost. It features only one single volume knob which is quite sensitive. There are basically two ways to use it: 1) as a booster in front of the amp (before going into the amps input) - this can be useful if you want to warm the tone up a little bit or increase your gain a little in case you have low-output pickups. 2) as a volume/lead boost in the fx-loop of the amp, so you just increase the overall volume of your amp, in case your amp doesn´t feature a volume boost. But watch out, the volume know is much more sensitive in this approach and reacts to even minimal adjustments with rather big volume increases. The way I use it is a volume boost for my solos/leads. I found dialed the right amount of boost in, so that the leads cut through the mix well (around 9 o´clock) and taped it over with gafo, to prevent the setting from getting messed during gigs and transport. The pedal doesn´t affect the sound considerably, dunno if it´s got a passive bypass though. But there are no sound issues with that. Of course the xotic ep booster sounds much sweeter and you can fine-tune the sound with midcontrol, etc. But the LPB costs only a small fraction of the EP price, so it´s really acceptable.
All in all, it´s a good solid volume-boost pedal, with a good value for money.
